work

Over the last… well… technically from the time we started the pilot, we are almost at a year (but to be more specific, we started post on the main series last September,) I was working on the motion graphics for a new series on the FYI network called My City’s Just Not That Into Me. And now it’s airing! It really is a fun show, and I had one heck of a lot of fun developing the graphics package. Granted, it was definitely done in a bit of a rush, but it was a joy to create these bright, fun graphics, and I thank the production company and the network for letting me have so much fun! This was the brain child of Melissa Cutlip, one of the founders of the Chicago production company Violet Media.

Once upon a time, I went to graduate school. An art school. A school revered around the world. And I worked very, very hard, and took all the advice and wisdom given to me by my favorite and most admired professors very, very seriously. Sometimes to a fault, but there is more on that later. I went to an art school that was, for lack of a more eloquent term, very “arty.” Commercial ventures were not outright sneered upon, but everything I studied was postmodern poststructuralist digital interactive using this new medium to create art that lives only in galleries or the occasional public space, drinking in theory, discussing the ideas and conflicts in the art world with regards to digital, as it related to the questioning of the validity of photography and film when those emerged, as they could be mechanically reproduced, and how did that affect the intrinsic value of the artwork and… well… you get the idea. It was graduate school. A wonderful bubble where these things were all you considered.

But here’s the thing. I never felt like I was ‘arty’ enough. I like creating characters. Concrete ones. Silly ones. Serious ones, but still… I am not exactly the Ellsworth Kelly of digital art. And so somehow I always, despite the encouragement of my professors, felt like I really did not belong. I was never the one who was about to create a large interactive digital space. But I kept thinking I had to be that person to justify my spot in that program. I had to be that Artist with the capital A. I had to be someone that I am not, at least in the way I thought they thought of me. One of my most influential professors told me I would become a famous artist in my own right, and that I should never work for a major studio because I would then be owned by them. I took that advice very much to heart, even though I still tried applying to Pixar and whatnot. Then I moved to Chicago.

Last year I was approached by a very talented Chicago editor/producer/writer/what have you named George Zwierzynski of Purple Stuff Productions to work on his wildly successful “Guys Book Club” series. What ensued was a creation based on a certain ubiquitous social networking site with a few… embellishments. It turned out to be quite a work of puzzle pieces, and one hell of a lot of fun to work on.